Director Edward Dmytryk ("Cornered"/"Confessions of
Boston Blackie") was paid $500 a week to make this
exploitation propaganda B film, which RKO made on the
cheap for $100,000. Dmytryk took over the director's
chair from his friend Irving Riis, who when shooting
started got into a spat with the producer Doc Golden
and quit. The studio ran a massive radio ad campaign
and released it nationally to a wide audience as an
eye-opening anti-Nazi film, and to its great surprise
it grossed seven and a half million dollars. The
screenplay by Emmet Lavery was based on the book
"Education for Death" by Gregor Ziemer. With the box
office success, both Lavery and Dmytryk received
substantial cash bonuses.

The film is narrated by Professor Nichols (Kent
Smith), head of the American Colony School in Germany.
He recalls the 'good old days' in 1933 before the war.
The Professor tells of the daily street fights between
the students in his school and the thuggish students
at the neighboring German school run by the Nazi
fanatic Dr. Schmidt (Erford Gage), who encourages his
students to dedicate their lives to Adolph Hitler and
brawl with the Americans. The German-American student
Anna Muller (Bonita Granville) and the Nazi spouting
student from the German school Karl Bruner (Tim Holt)
have a love-hate relationship, with him getting
carried away with her piano playing and falling for
her despite their ideological differences. The
Professor encourages the romance by inviting Karl to
attend their school picnics.

Anna is now, in May of 1939, a teacher at the
American school. At a Memorial Day celebration the
Gestapo arrives and demands custody of all Germans, Lithuanians, Poles and
Jews at the school. In addition they take away Anna,
and when the Professor lodges a complaint to the
Gestapo officer in charge, Lt. Karl Bruner, he's told
that as a German citizen Anna is subject to German
law. Further complaints to the American Embassy prove
useless. The Professor then turns to his German
journalist friend Franz Erhardt (Lloyd Corrigan) for
help, but he's too cowardly and only tells that Anna's
in a labor camp. When Anna refuses to join an escape
plan hatched by their Professor (afraid it's too risky
for the teach) and fails to go along with the New
Order, Karl's boss Colonel Henkel (Otto Kruger)
sentences her to hard labor at the camp and whippings.

The Nazis are shown to be monsters whose youth is
molded to militaristic duty and educated in hatred,
and it shows their warped policies in programs such as
forced sterilization and for allowing young girls to
willingly submit to being impregnated by Aryan men
(with or without a marriage certificate) in order to
sustain the "Master Race." By the end Karl and Anna
have fallen in love, as he renounces his Nazi beliefs.
But their relationship proves to be a doomed one, as
both are executed. The melodramatics seemed
artificial, as the film ends with a Goethe poem about
freedom being read aloud over the radio by Karl and
the fleeing Professor rhetorically asking "Can we stop
Hitler's children before it is too late?"